Unqualified Caddie: A Scottsdale Golf Love-Story

Kirk is the reason Carson knows anything about golf. Carson's dad worked with him, Kirk somehow got talked into training with a post military Carson, and 15 years later Carson is training tour players using what he learned from the guy sitting across from him. Twenty years on the PGA Tour, 15 more on the Champions Tour, and this is his first podcast ever.

He opens by refusing the premise of the icebreaker. Asked where he'd take a buddy who flew in to play, he wants to know the purpose first. Are you making him better, making sure he has fun, or getting into his pocket? He says he doesn't do anything in golf without a reason, and that's the thread for the whole conversation. The way you actually improve is to build an honest feedback loop: look at your scores, find out why the bogeys happen, and answer honestly. Most people skip that and go book a lesson where they get told their right elbow should point down, which is a tiny piece of a much bigger puzzle. Carson describes learning the opposite way, getting a set of rules for his level that got him under 80, including the heresy that your driver is a tool with a distance and a shape rather than a thing you hit as hard as you can.

Then the stories. Caddies quitting mid-round is nothing new. He came up around the old Augusta caddies, when players didn't travel with their own guy and the tour had a pool of caddies with nicknames he can't repeat. His definition of a good caddie is nerve: being able to look his player in the eye and say no. The best example is his own wife, who caddied 15 to 20 events for him. At Torrey Pines, sitting in a tie for second with Peter Jacobsen three shots ahead and a real amount of money on the line, Kirk decided he was going to fire at a tucked pin downwind over the water while Jacobsen walked up. She set the bag down an inch from his ball and told him he was going to wait. He hit it on, made a 12-footer and kept the tie for second. He tells every caddie he's had that story, and says most of them tell him they wouldn't have done it.

There's also a pro-am story that lands perfectly. Last hole, 175 yards, par three with water right, and Kirk talks a six-handicap through his "see it, feel it, trust it" routine, replacing swing thoughts with target thoughts. The guy makes a hole in one. The best part, Kirk says, is the silence before anyone reacts.

Running underneath all of it is the line he keeps returning to: being a professional means doing the thing you don't want to do. Lay up when laying up wins. Watch the player and caddie talk on TV, because everyone out there has the same shots and the difference is who makes better decisions.

October in Scottsdale means overseeding, closed courses and a few weeks where nobody's playing. Carson and Nate use the gap to make the case for training instead of waiting, then give you the two moves they'd pick if they could only pick two. The whole episode is recorded standing up, and Nate spends most of it holding a horse stance for reasons he never fully justifies.

The first move is the kettlebell halo, held bottom-up and circled around the head. Carson likes it because it covers a lot of ground at once: wrist and elbow strength, which matters if you're a golfer with elbow issues, plus shoulder mobility, body awareness and a little rotation. About 90 percent of his tour players do it before a round. Nate's addition is to do it in a horse stance and to pay attention to the upper back, since most people who walk into the gym can't flex, extend or rotate well through the thoracic spine. Get that moving and you breathe better, your low back takes less load, and the shoulder and trap stuff that creeps into your neck often settles down.

The second is a band move Carson calls the Reaper, after a Ranger buddy who had a better name for it than "band twist." Band anchored at belly-button height, outside hand through the loop, wide stance, then rotate your chest through while the inside arm posts out like a stiff arm. The coaching cues are the point here: move your chest, not your arm, keep everything rotating around your spine, and plant the back foot when the band is heavy instead of letting it pull you around.

Both moves earn their spot because they're cheap. Low cost on the body compared to a barbell deadlift or a back squat, usable as a warmup, safe to do most days, and good at the beginning of a season and all the way through it. The guys also make a short argument about gear: new shoes and a new driver are fun, and this is the version where the shiny new thing is your own body.

A short bonus episode recorded between training sessions at MotionLab. Carson has decided the audience doesn't fully grasp how unqualified his co-host is, so he builds a test. He gives Nate the first word of a famous course and Nate has to supply the rest. Nate sets the bar for becoming a "qualified caddie" at 50 percent, which turns out to be optimistic.

Pebble Beach goes fine. So does St. Andrews, eventually. Augusta gets answered with "Georgia," then "Augusta Dunes." Cypress Point becomes Cypress Hills. The Royal round alone produces Royal Palms, Royal Citadel and Royal Bergdahl, none of which exist. Along the way Carson explains why Harbour Town is beloved by every player he works with, what makes Cypress Point the best piece of land a course was ever built on, and how the Bethpage Black tee sign tells you whether you have any business being there.

Then Nate is asked what the US Open actually is, and his answer is that it's a competition for Americans at a place where a lot of Americans go to play, four or five rounds depending on whether you count the practice round. Carson rests his case. The episode wraps with the actual majors, a ruling that the Waste Management is not one of them, and Nate going back to the gym to teach the thing he's actually qualified to teach.

Mike (possibly his real name but we're not telling) has been playing golf for more than 50 years and rates courses for a national panel. He walks Carson and Nate through how that actually works, starting with the accusation everyone makes: that rankings are bought.

His answer is that the respected panels are a defined process. Raters get trained, they follow set criteria, scores get aggregated and their own performance gets reviewed. Do it badly and you're off the panel. He breaks down what he scores on every hole: shot options, character and ingenuity for the era, challenge from the back tees, layout variety, fun, aesthetics, and whether the course plays firm and fast. Before he ever shows up, he looks up the designer and the story, because he treats a course like a book with 18 chapters and wants to know what each one is telling him.

He also plays the forward tees on purpose. A lot of modern courses are brutal for shorter hitters, and added tee boxes often don't even line up with the hole. Then there's the part where members figure out who he is and try to buy him lunch.

Carson gets into why desert golf is harder to read than tree-lined golf, where the framing and bunker placement do the work that trees do at a place like Harbour Town. The guys agree that golf etiquette is disappearing and that it deserves its own episode. Mike's favorites include the Cape hole at National Golf Links and a round at Chicago Golf Club, one of the USGA's founding clubs. The episode closes with a round of course superlatives, including most likely to make you lie on your scorecard and most likely to make you hit the same shot twice.

Dr. Greg Law is a doctor of physical therapy and a Titleist Medical Level 3 provider. He owns Laws of Motion Physical Therapy in Scottsdale and has spent his career keeping golfers in the game. He sits down with Carson and Nate to talk about the injuries he sees most, the ones golfers give themselves, and why so few people do their rehab homework.

Low backs and hips top the list. Golfers want to rotate fast, and when the hips and upper back can't give them that rotation, the lower back pays for it. Elbows come second, usually from a new grip that feels weak, so people squeeze harder and hit way more balls off a mat. Greg tells the story of a Korn Ferry Tour player whose swing change gave him back pain, and Carson explains why he sometimes tells tour players to slow down on a swing change. The idea they keep coming back to is simple: just because you can doesn't mean you should, and a swing built for a 20-year-old tour player probably isn't built for a 50-year-old with three back surgeries.

The guys also get into when you should get a movement assessment (as soon as you start taking the game seriously) and what percentage of patients do their home exercises (Greg's generous guess is 35%). Then there's what changes in a golfer's body between 25 and 60. For most people it comes down to a stiff upper back and forgetting how to take a full breath. Greg's fix starts on the floor, where you lie flat and breathe. His closing advice for every golfer in Scottsdale is to build your capacity now, before three ibuprofen becomes part of your pre-round routine.

Nate has decided that if he can't get better at golf, he might as well commit to getting worse. Carson, a scratch golfer who has watched a lot of people do exactly that, helps him build the plan.

It starts on the course, where a playing partner called himself a single-digit handicap and then shot like a 9.8 in a group of scratch players. Carson explains the only two things good golfers care about: pretending you're better than you are, and slow play. From there the guys get into Shakespeare, the gym rule that anyone who volunteers their bench press probably can't lift it, and a caddie who claimed 15 pull-ups and then did them.

Then the real list begins. Watch every pro swing breakdown on YouTube and copy whatever feels right. Never take a lesson. Swing harder. Buy a new driver, then blame the clubs, the ball, the shoes and the wind when the scores don't move. Carson covers why the feels in a golf swing usually don't match what's happening, why new gear won't fix a swing you're still building, and why his tour players could probably shoot even par with a shovel.

The flip side is the part that works. New gear can get you practicing more, and a new driver makes a great reward for hitting a handicap goal. What really lowers your scores is the process: practice, a pre-shot routine, smart course strategy and staying calm after a bad shot. Nate also asks whether wearing all orange would help. The answer is a firm maybe.

You don't need a new driver to get better at golf.

On this episode of Unqualified Caddy, Chris breaks down three completely free ways to improve your game:

• Improve your swing mechanics.
• Play the shot you have, not the shot you wish you had. Better strategy, smarter targets, and a better short game can save strokes fast.
• Pick ONE thing to work on every three rounds. Ball position, stance, alignment, whatever it is. Give it enough time to actually improve before changing something else.

Then there's the bonus way: improve the body swinging the club.

Better strength, mobility, balance, and conditioning can give you access to positions you currently can't get into, help you produce more speed, and make it easier to repeat your swing late in a round.

You can have great instruction, but if your hips won't rotate, your shoulders don't move well, or you can't control the positions your coach is asking for, there's a ceiling on what swing mechanics alone can fix.

Sometimes the cheapest way to improve your golf game is to improve the golfer.

Andrew Welk has coached enough young golfers to see the pattern clearly. The kids getting the most instruction are often the ones playing the worst. Every shot gets a swing thought, every mistake gets a correction, and somewhere in all that input the player stops thinking for himself. In this episode Andrew joins Carson and Nate to make the case that autonomy, not more coaching, is what actually builds better golfers.

Carson and Andrew dig into what real autonomy looks like on the course. Not handing a kid a club and walking away, but stepping back enough that they start solving problems themselves instead of waiting for the next instruction. Nate, running on zero golf pedigree and a lot of movement science, asks the questions any parent standing next to the cart would ask. The conversation will make you rethink how much you're actually helping when you're "helping."

Andrew also talks about his own history with golf and what he did to adapt to the pressure of the sport, 7 wrist surgeries and a heart surgery.. He's been sober seven years, and he shares how that shift changed the way he shows up on the course and in life. It's a grounded, honest part of the conversation, just a guy talking about what changed and what stuck.

Carson brings the golf IQ, Nate brings the biomechanics and the occasional wrong take, and Andrew brings a perspective earned from years of watching players up close. Whether you're raising a young athlete, coaching one, or just trying to stop calling every shot from the sideline, this one's worth the drive time.

Kevin Masterson joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation about golf in Scottsdale and beyond, and things get honest fast. Kevin walks Carson and Nate through the game from every angle: what keeps people obsessed with golf, what it takes to actually get better, and the lessons he picked up watching and learning from professional golfers along the way.

Then comes the part every golfer dreads and secretly loves talking about: his worst day on the course. No detail spared. If you've ever had a round fall apart in front of people who were watching, you'll feel this one in your chest.

This episode is for golfers in Scottsdale and Phoenix looking for real talk about the game, not another swing-tip video. Kevin, Carson, and Nate dig into golf strategy, mental game, course management, and the humbling moments that make this sport what it is. Whether you play the top Scottsdale golf courses every weekend or you're just getting into the game, this conversation has something for you.

New episodes of Unqualified Caddie drop weekly. Scottsdale golf fans, weekend hackers, and anyone who has ever three-putted in front of a stranger, this one's for you.

We're kicking things off the only way that makes sense: Carson and Nate arguing about where to play golf in Scottsdale. Carson's a scratch golfer who's walked every fairway in the Valley. Nate's a movement and biomechanics coach who can tell you exactly why your hips aren't rotating right but has no idea what "target-rich" means on a scorecard.

This episode is a rundown of the most fun courses in Scottsdale, the ones locals actually love, the ones tourists overpay for, and the handful that are worth the hype. Expect strong opinions, some correcting of Nate's terminology, and a real answer to the question everyone visiting Scottsdale asks: where do I actually play?

If you're planning a golf trip to Scottsdale, or you live here and want a local's take instead of a top-ten list written by someone who's never set foot in the desert, this one's for you